Haskell Weekly News: September 12, 2009

Welcome to issue 130 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Welcome to issue 130 of HWN! In the last week, HWN has gotten a new
editor, me! I'm Joe Fredette (jfredett on IRC, reddit, and everywhere else),
and I'll be taking over for Brent (byorgey) from now on. I think I speak
for the whole community when I thank him for his excellent work on the HWN
and associated tools. I have a few ideas about how I want to change HWN for
the better, and hopefully you'll like them too! So, without further ado,
The Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

Looking for a
new HWN editor. Brent Yorgey
went
looking for a new editor for the HWN, and that's how you got me! See the
editorial for more details.

hecc-0.1. Marcel Fourné
announced
the first release of hecc, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography Library
for Haskell. Implemented are affine, projective, jacobian and modified
jacobian point formats with the basic operations. Included as an Example
is a basic ECDH as well as a basic speed test.

HLint 1.6.8. Neil Mitchell
announced
HLint 1.6.8. HLint is a tool for suggesting improvements to your source
code. It suggests the use of library functions you may have been unaware
of, finds patterns of recursion that are really folds/maps, hints about
extensions you aren't using and much more. HLint is now one of the top
20 applications on Hackage, and is used by the darcs project to improve
and statically check their code base.

A Levenberg-Marquardt implementation. Bas van Dijk
announced
the release of a Haskell binding to Manolis Lourakis's C levmar
library. This library implements the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm which
is an iterative technique that finds a local minimum of a function that
is expressed as the sum of squares of nonlinear functions. It has become a
standard technique for nonlinear least-squares problems and can be thought
of as a combination of steepest descent and the Gauss-Newton method.

CCA-0.1. Paul L
announced
that a library for Causal Commutative Arrows (CCA) has been uploaded to
Hackage DB. It implements CCA normalization using Template Haskell and
a modified arrow pre-processor (based on arrowp) to generate outout that
Template Haskell can parse. It's highly experimental since we are still
fiddling with several design choices, and by no means we imply Template
Haskell is the best choice to implement CCA. Any suggestion or comment
is welcome!

graphviz-2999.5.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
version 2999.5.0.0 of the graphviz package for Haskell. This is what
I like to think of as the 'Hey, this is almost getting to be a decent
library!' version. The graphviz package provides bindings to the GraphViz
suite of programs by providing the ability to generate and parse GraphViz's
Dot language as well as wrappers around the tools themselves.

uvector-algorithms 0.2. Dan Doel
announced
version 0.2 of the uvector-algorithms package. The package so far has
implementations of several sorting and selection algorithms for use on
the mutable arrays from the uvector library, as well as combinators for
applying them to immutable arrays.

dbmigrations 0.1. Jonathan Daugherty
announced
dbmigrations, A library and program for the creation, management, and
installation of schema updates (called migrations) for a relational
database. In particular, this package lets the migration author
express explicit dependencies between migrations and the management tool
automatically installs or reverts migrations accordingly, using transactions
for safety. This package is written to support any HDBC-supported database,
although at present only PostgreSQL is fully supported.

Palindromes 0.1. Johan Jeuring
announced
Palindromes, a package for finding palindromes in files. Visit the homepage The primary
features of Palindromes include: A linear-time algorithm for finding
exact palindromes, A linear-time algorithm for finding text palindromes,
ignoring spaces, case of characters, and punctuation symbols.

Discussion

Averting QuickCheck Madness. Christopher
Lane Hinson
Christopher Hinson asked
about best practices with regards to QuickCheck, and it's
inclusion/exclusion as a dependency for end-user programs.

How to customize dyre recompile? Andy Stewart
Andy Stewart asked
about how to customize Dyre's settings to do a whole-program
recompilation.

Parallel parsing & multicore. Anakim Border
Anakim Border talked
about parallel parsing, specifically about a parser he had put together,
which led to a discussion of Edward Kmett's recent talks at BAHUG.